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Food sharing at meals

Kinship, reciprocity, and clustering in the taimyr autonomous okrug, northern Russia

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Abstract

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Boise State University, 1910 University Drive, 83725-1950, Boise, Idaho

    John Ziker

  2. University of Cologne, USA

    Michael Schnegg

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  1. John Ziker
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Correspondence to John Ziker.

Additional information

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Social Science Program (OPP 9528936) and Title VIII research fellowships from the International Research & Exchanges Board and the American Council of Teachers of Russian, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of State, Program for Scientific Research in Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship) sponsored the compilation of the meal records. A grant from the Leakey Foundation provided support to develop the analysis techniques, as well as additional research on food distribution in Ust’-Avam to be described in future publications. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, or any of the other funding agencies or the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which supported a two-day workshop on social network analysis with Michael Schnegg, August 1–2, 2002. Special thanks go to the research team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks: Jenny Newton, Britt Arnesen, and Tom Delaune. Comments from Ed Hagen, Robert Hunt, Robert Layton, Nobuhiru Kishigami, and Will Palmer helped to improve this paper, but we are responsible for the views presented.

John P. Ziker specializes in sociocultural anthropology and human behavioral ecology and conducts fieldwork in northern Siberia. He joined Boise State University’s Department of Anthropology in 2003. He received a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University’s Honors College and a master’s and doctorate from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany (2001–2003). His research has focused on big-game hunting in Siberia. He has authored articles and book chapters dealing with changing indigenous economies, forms of property and their sustainability, and native food and health in Siberia.

Michael Schnegg is a researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany. He studied anthropology, sociology, history, and economics in Cologne and Hamburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 2003. He did extensive fieldwork on kinship and social organization among peasants in Tlaxcala (Mexico) and pastoralists in northwestern Namibia. His methodological focus has been on the application of formal network methods to the study of social structure in contemporary and historical societies. Currently he is conducting comparative research about exchange networks and household vulnerability in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Ziker, J., Schnegg, M. Food sharing at meals. Hum Nat 16, 178–210 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-005-1003-6

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